EUROPE IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

By the mid-11^th century, Europe was entering a period of great and rapid transformation. The conditions of material life that produced the transformation are not yet well understood, although the following may be noted with certainty:

• The long period of Germanic and Asian migrations had come to a definite end, and Europe enjoyed a continuity of settled population.

• A population expansion had begun and continued until the late thirteenth century creating shortage of land in some areas.

• Town life, which had never entirely ceased during the previous centuries, experienced remarkable growth and development, thereby breaking the tendency of the medieval farm towards economic self-sufficiency.

• Trade and commerce, particularly in the Mediterranean lands of Italy and southern France and in the Low Countries, increased in quantity, regularity, and extent. 

• At the same time people began to identify themselves as members of larger and more abstract groups and communities of interest than those of their families and neighbours.

The political events of the period were intimately connected with these new developments.

One of the major events was the rapid rise to power of the Normans. Descendants of Vikings who settled in northern France during the 9^th and 10^th centuries, the Normans burst on to the scene of European history in 1066, when they conquered England under Duke William of Normandy. William secured his conquest by a programme of extensive resettlement; the French-speaking Normans became the ruling class of England, tied to William by land grants and feudal obligations. This systematic introduction of feudalism and the imposition of other Norman institutions brought England into the mainstream of continental political and social development[1]. The Duke of Normandy, a feudal dependent of the king of France[2], was now also king of England, his equal in status and his superior in strength.  This illustrates the growing complexity of the European world.

In the German and Italian territories of the German Empire, the new activity of the Papacy[3] as a real governing body came into conflict with the power of the emperor in a tangle of issues collectively known as the Investiture Controversy. Throughout the early periods of the Empire no strict separation had been made in theory or reality between the ecclesiastical and political realms. From the moment of the alliance of the Carolingians with the pope in the early-9^th century, the emperor was considered not solely a secular figure. Similarly, the bishops, princes of the Church, were secular powers in their own right, advisers and feudal retainers of kings and emperors. It was unquestioned that the secular power should play a part in the selection of bishops and be an active presence in episcopal coronation or investiture. The struggle broke out precisely over this practice of lay investiture, as successive popes declared the primacy of the Church in the choice and consecration of its own officials[4].

The most important result of the controversy was that it called into question all relations between church and state. In theology, law, and political theory, the state, as a secular entity, was critically examined, as was the Church, not only as the community of Christian worshippers but also as an administrative aristocracy of bishops in the service of the pope. The monarchical Church became, by the end of the 12^th century, a single great European political power alongside the various emergent secular states.

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